To address global poverty - do we really not have enough resources or do we not have the right tools to allocate our resources?
The tools of finance, when applied correctly, can be an enabler of social and environmental outcomes. This course is designed to give you the ability to build innovative financing strategies that work towards outcomes such as financial inclusion, access to energy and access to education. The innovative finance process has five key components. It starts with identifying the outcomes you are looking to achieve and next moves on to due diligencing your issue area using techniques like design thinking to make sure you are designing with the end user. Next you must map all of the resources available for your outcome and then discover opportunities to augment these through business model innovation, multi-stakeholder partnerships and innovative financial structures. Finally, the last step is to put all of these pieces together to design an innovating financing strategy.
Each week dives into a component of the process using examples and real case studies from social entrepreneurs, non-profits, development funders, impact investors, governments, foundations and more. Over five weeks you’ll learn about new types of revenue creation, financing approaches, business models and partnerships. By the end of the course, you’ll have the ability to hack finance for social change.
Watch the course trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSMUoCJgqkw

From the lesson

Identifying Resources

Congratulations on reaching week 3! This week we are going to focus on the resources you have to achieve the outcomes in your issue area. The primary goal of this week is to get you to think creatively about your assets, revenue streams and funding sources. We are going to start with how you create revenue from assets that you have already identified and work that you (or others) are already doing. Then we are going to look at the different types of funders you should think about engaging with around resourcing. We will also look at websites to find information about these funders. We will spend a bit of time speaking about a specific type of contract called an outcomes-based contract, which can be an effective tool to create revenue streams from a third party payer. Finally, our cases are going to speak about how they identified resources to address their issue area and work towards their outcomes. You’ll hear the case participants reference the different types of funders that we discuss as well as the opportunity to use an outcomes-based contract. The assignments this week include a graded quiz and creating a resource map. Let’s get going!